I just wrote a blog about the Maldives’ underwater meeting to bring attention to sea level rise due to global warming. I then read an article about the U.S. Chesapeake Bay area that has been suffering sea level rise for quite a while and it’s getting worse. This news hasn’t made mainstream TV much because beach areas typically rely upon tourism. Officials of towns with beaches affected by sea level rise don’t want anyone to know the amount of sand they haul in annually to replenish what is rapidly disappearing. So beaches near resorts and hotels don’t belie how bad the situation there really is.
The article titled “Slip Sliding Away,” by David Fahrenthold was in National Wildlife Federation’s Oct/Nov Issue. It claims that many beaches are now bulkheads built to stave off rising sea levels. Sea levels that are “rising almost twice as fast in the Chesapeake region as in most of the world.” This area finds its communities spending millions to keep water from eroding more sand, and shipping sand in from elsewhere to maintain a beach area at all.
It was explained that two natural phenomena are affecting Chesapeake Bay and the mid Atlantic shore line. The land is dropping in the already low-lying Chesapeake Bay. This sinking is a result of huge glaciers melting in the north. Large glaciers put so much weight on the earth’s crust at one point it causes land to rise at the opposite end, “like a seesaw.” Melting Arctic glaciers are lightening the load so the Chesapeake area suffers from sinking. It happened in the first Ice Age. The other phenomenon is that climate change affects ocean currents. Chesapeake Bay is witnessing a weakened system of currents that pulls water away from the shore.
This presents a double whammy to the whole mid Atlantic area. I couldn’t believe the cost of replacing beaches and battling erosion. Virginia Beach reportedly spent $7 million in 2006 to “deposit 100,000 dump truck’s worth of sand on its beach. With Chesapeake Bay covering approx. 65,000 sq. miles, and being the U.S. largest and most biologically diverse estuary there is a lot at stake.
And like the Maldivians were trying to get across to everyone with their underwater town meeting is that places like the Maldives and Kiribati are only precursors of what will continue to happen along more and more coastlines. Add the Chesapeake Bay and mid Atlantic to the early list and disregard the skeptics that say it ain’t so.
Read more about sea level rise in the Chesapeake Bay: http://www.nwf.org/sealevelrise/chesapeake.cfm
About changing ocean currents: http://www.piscoweb.org/research/science-by-discipline/coastal-oceanography/ocean-currents.